Turning from the opportunity to the lesson, from the commercial and
economic aspects of this question to those that are political in the
large sense, one's imagination is appalled at the potentialities of the
yet unknown results of so vast an upheaval. Yet we must envisage some of
these if we are to be prepared for their effect upon us. We must be
ready for the impact of the resultant forces of these great dynamics. We
must be ready everywhere, but nowhere more than in our relations with
Latin America, in the zone of the Caribbean, and wherever the Monroe
Doctrine as still interpreted gives us a varying degree of
responsibility.
The war's first effect upon our Latin-American relations is to compel
through commercial and financial rapprochement a larger measure of
material interdependence, more contact, and, we may hope, a substitution
of knowledge for the former reciprocity of ignorance. All this makes for
better social and intellectual relations, good understanding and
friendship, and so for political relations much more substantial in the
case of many of the republics than the rather flimsy Pan-Americanism
celebrated in eloquent speeches and futile international conferences.
There is little in Pan-Americanism of that kind. The "raza Latina" of
eloquence is not itself homogeneous; still less so is the population of
the whole hemisphere. And with Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and
Santiago we have, of course, far less propinquity than we have with the
capitals of Europe. But what we really can do is to build up, especially
with the nearer republics, real ties of common interest and good
neighborhood, and with the distant ones ties of commerce and esteem.
The war may tend to cure certain rather self-centred countries of
affecting the morbid view that the people of the United States are lying
awake nights contriving to devour them, when, in fact, it would be hard
to find in a crowded street in the United States one in a thousand of
the passersby who knew more than the name, at most, of one of those very
few countries referred to.
Europe's preoccupation with the war temporarily deprives such a country
and its few misguided prophets whose monomania is dread of that chimera,
the "Colossus of the North," of the pastime of nestling up to Europe in
the hope of annoying us. It postpones, too, the hope of the morbid ones
that we shall come to war with a powerful enemy. Now, perhaps, even
these will appreciate the remark of a diplomatist of a certain weak
country in contact with European powers, who once said: "If we only had
the United States for a neighbor! What I can't understand is that your
neighbors do not realize their good luck." Turning from these
exceptional phenomena, the very fact of the war leaves the United States
in a general position of greater political prestige.
Whatever the upshot of the European tragedy, its political and
psychological consequences are likely to be great. If it result in new
national divisions upon racial lines of more reality, who knows but that
the awakened spirits of nationality will germinate fresh military
ambitions? Or will the horrors of the war force political reforms and
the search for assurance in more democratic institutions against any
repetition of those horrors? And is popular government an assurance
against useless war while men remain warlike even when not military?
Except from the successful countries or from those where disaster has
brought such sobering change that men can return to work heartened with
new hope, when the war is over there is likely to be a heavy emigration
of disgusted people. Possibly even victory will be so dear that men will
emigrate from a country half prostrate in its triumph. Many will come as
the Puritans came, and as the bulk of our own excellent Germanic element
came, and will cast in their lot with a new nation. We shall get a good
share, but doubtless some will go to the republics of the far South, and
some to the highlands of the tropics and through the canal to the West
Coast. If so, this will tend gradually toward increased production and
purchasing power, as well as toward a leavening of social, political,
and economic conditions of life.
If the war were indecisive or left all the combatants more or less
prostrated, peaceful immigration might give a big impulse to the
gradual growing up of powerful States in the temperate zone of the
extreme South. The situation there, and the evolution of our own power,
make it perhaps even now fair to consider the question of regarding as
optional in any given case the assertion by us of the Monroe Doctrine
much below the equator, let us say, beyond which it may possibly be
doubtful whether we have nowadays much reason for special interest.
But, even so, our relations to South America and our obligations under
the Monroe Doctrine, in spite of the blessed fortifications of the
Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, leave us where it is tempting fate to be
without a navy of the first magnitude, and a big merchant marine. We
have seen what happened to Belgium and Luxemburg. We have seen how even
some of the most enlightened nations can still make force their god.
Nations learn slowly, and there are perhaps some new big ones coming on,
like China.
If the war is a fight to a finish, and the Allies triumph, we can
imagine Russia, with its teeming millions of people, occupied for a
while in the Near East; Japan consolidating her position in the Far
East, an increasingly powerful neighbor to us in the Philippines, the
Hawaiian Islands, and the Pacific Ocean; France still a great power; and
England as a world power of uncomfortably ubiquitous strength, able to
challenge the Monroe Doctrine at will.
Or, let us suppose that Germany should triumph and that German
emigration should swarm into the Caribbean countries, or into Brazil or
some other country where there is already a large German colony--elated,
triumphant Germans, not Germans disgusted by a disastrous war. Would
Germany be likely to heed the Monroe Doctrine, or would it be only
another "scrap of paper"?
In the present stage of civilization the safety of America should not be
left dependent upon the forbearance of any power that may emerge
dangerously strong from the war or that may otherwise arise. The
obligations and rights of our Latin-American relations, under the Monroe
Doctrine and otherwise, like our security and our efficiency as a force
for peace and good in the world, demand a big navy, a merchant marine,
and the self-discipline and safeguard of adequate military preparedness.
The need of these and of a diplomacy of intelligent self-interest,
continuity, and intense nationalism is the lesson brought home to us by
the European war in its effects upon our Latin-American relations as
well as upon our general position as a great power.